This chapter is about making friends, and specifically, how to make friends when what you really want to do with your new friends is pretend to be enemies. It manages to illustrate this on several levels within not many pages, and it’s really quite clever.
Now he is preparing to direct four of the Maddermarket’s 2017 shows – Hay Fever, Swallows and Amazons , Nell Gwynn and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase…
No cryptically whimisical title for this chapter. This is Serious Bizniss.
Poor John wakes up all of a muddle. I can’t quite tell whether he’s wishing that his story had stayed pottersome or hoping that it will turn into a thriller, and I’m not sure that he knows, either.
The plot thickens. Thickens like a sauce that you’ve been stirring patiently for half an hour, and you turn away from it for less than a minute. So far they’ve basically been pottering about, wittily sewing on buttons. Now there’s smoke, shaking of fists, and a mysterious disappearing pirate ship. You can hardly see for the foreshadowing.
This new year, 2017, will not only see the 20th anniversary of the Nancy Blackett Trust, but it will also be 80 years since the publication of “We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea“, and on a more sombre note, 50 years since Arthur Ransome died…
‘I’d like to go to Africa,’ I declared as a little girl, ‘and see forests full of parrots.’ This I did. Everything I had ever hoped to see was spread out before me and the experience left a profound impression…
Visit England has declared 2017 the ‘Year of Literary Heroes’, highlighting anniversaries of great writers, including Arthur Ransome, who died 50 years ago in 1967 – and Suffolk’s Shotley Peninsula, which features in two of his books, and where his famous yacht Nancy Blackett is based, is joining in with gusto.
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I’m interested in the boundaries these siblings set for each other. Titty doesn’t want John and Susan to know that she’s practicing being a cormorant, but she’s absolutely fine with telling them that she’s diving for pearls.
A Happy Christmas to all of our supporters! Have a wonderful day tomorrow and thank you for all of your support this year.